March Books

Marie NDiaye, Percival Everett, Elena Ferrante, Domenico Starnone

My attention span abandoned me this March and I struggled to get into or absorb anything I read. I started and put down a number of books, among others, The Lord of All the Dead, by Javier Cercas, which is one of those non-fiction novels in which fact and narrative step all over each others toes instead of dancing in harmony, and Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, which was good enough but simply too big a meal for my appetite at the time. And those I finished I struggle to remember much of. The books I made it through are below:

All My Friends (2013), by Marie NDiaye, translated from the French by Jordan Stump (2023)

All of the stories in All My Friends are populated by the most wretched characters. In the title story, an old teacher becomes deeply invested in the life of an ex-student, who works as his maid. He tries desperately to convince her to leave her husband for his former star pupil. In the “Death of Claude François” the narrator visits a childhood friend who took an oath to never leave her bleak Paris project following the death of a famous singer. In “The Boys”, a family of farmers sell one of their sons to a wealthy old woman, propelling him to fame and wealth as a sex symbol. In “Brulard’s Day”, an aging, failed actress experiences a mental breakdown and a splintering of her ego. In “Revelation”, a woman takes a bus trip to sell her son.

Throughout nearly all of these stories, NDiaye’s characters have damaged notions of youth and childhood. They rob or ruin the childhood of their sons and daughters. They are unable to face their own senescence and act poorly and erratically. The behavior of these characters is so bizarre, so depraved, so desperate as to lend the stories a sense of absurdity or surrealism. Their actions seem to infect the world giving it a post-apocalyptic, even when there is little in the way of exposition or out-and-out world building.

This was the first I’d read of NDiaye, and I am definitely intrigued. She was another writer I’d heard about through Amina Cain’s A Horse at Night. If anyone’s read anything else by her and has recommendations, let me know.

God’s Country (1994), by Percival Everett

After winning the 2024 National Book Award for James and seeing his 2001 novel, Erasure, adapted into the acclaimed American Fiction in 2023, Percival Everett’s star has never been higher. I’ve not got around to reading James or seeing American Fiction (though I have read Erasure), but I continue to roam about in his back catalog.

God’s Country is about a white rancher named Curt Marder who hires Bubba, a Black ranch-hand and tracker to help hunt down the ruffians who burned down his farm, killed his dog, and kidnapped his wife. It is a farce from the very beginning. It’s abundantly clear that whenever given the choice, Curt will make a poor one, and it’s unclear exactly what motivates him beyond the pursuit of whatever urge bubbles up from his loins into his brain at any given time. He is easily led astray from the search for his wife, distracted time and again by his desire to sleep with prostitutes, going so far as abetting General Custard in the genocide of Indigenous Americans for the promise of some pocket change.

As a western, it is a send-up of the genre that succeeds because it doesn’t forget to be an example of it. Its observations about the legacy of white supremacy, Manifest Destiny, and the U.S. Frontier may be on the nose, but Everett doesn’t get overly academic with it — the characters are named things like Pickle Cheeseboro and spend their time scratching their pits:

“I love the west,” I said and they all turned to me. “The west is as far as I can see when I’m facin’ that way.” I was feelin’ poetic and they was listenin’. “That’s the way it’s always been, the way it is and the way it’s gone be. Why, a white man can come out here with nothing and die with everything.”

“So, you love the west,” Tucker said.

“Sure do.”

“Then it’s a stupid love you got.”

How you figure?” I asked.

“‘Cause the west don’t love you back son,” Tucker said. “You’re just whacking off in the sand. Sure, it feels all right, but you’ll end up with nothing to show for it and just having to do it again. Plus, it ties up a perfectly good hand that you might be using for somethin’ else.”

I think Everett is at his best when writing westerns. It’s maybe not a pure example of the genre, but for my money Assumption, a triptych of stories and novellas about a deputy sheriff in a small New Mexico town, is the best thing he’s written that I’ve read. God’s Country didn’t quite hit those heights, but it does have me looking up the other westerns he’s written.

The Days of Abandonment (2002), by Elena Ferrante, translated by Ann Goldstein (2005)

The Days of Abandonment will tread familiar ground for those who have read the Neapolitan Novels. It’s about Olga, a woman from Naples, and her struggles in navigating the aftermath of the collapse of her marriage when her husband, Mario, leaves her for a much younger woman (whom he essentially groomed). She goes through the classic stages of grief, beginning with denial and bargaining, engaging in some painful, shameless yearning for her piece of shit husband that pulls her children into her desperation and creates a wholly toxic home environment:

“Your father is coming tonight. We have to do everything we can so that he won’t go away again.”

Ilaria announced as if it were a threat:

“Then I’ll tell him about the bump.”

“Tell him whatever you like.”

Gianni said, with great emotion:

“I’ll tell him that since he’s been gone my homework has been full of mistakes and I’m doing badly in school.”

”Yes,” I said approvingly, “tell him everything. Tell him you need him, tell him that he has to choose between you and this new woman he has.”

When it becomes increasingly clear that Mario is never coming back, she gives way to rage and begins to fray at the seams. After assaulting Mario on the street one day, falls apart completely. She struggles to tackle the most basic tasks necessary to keep herself alive and well, let alone provide for her two children. She flails around for the span of the novel until her failures mount and meet her all at once — her dog eats poison, her children fall ill, her electric is cut off, and she manages to lock herself in her apartment. It’s a subdued slapstick novel that is first a tragedy, then farce, and threatens to come back around into tragedy again.

This was the first thing I read by Ferrante that wasn’t part of the Neapolitan Quartet. There was something refreshing about seeing her operate in a slightly different register and at a very different pace. I remember the Neapolitan Novels for their breadth, covering a friendship (and really an entire neighborhood of people) from childhood through middle age. This is a slim novel, more focused and restrained, although recognizable elements pop their heads in to say hello. Throughout the Neapolitan Novels, you see Elena and Lila fight to avoid reproducing the unhappy domestic lives of their parents. Here you see a close-up of one of the unhappiest moments these lives can offer, explored in slow detail.

Trust (2019), by Domenico Starnone, translated by Jhumpa Lahiri (2021)

Trust opens with Pietro, a middling literature professor, on the verge of breaking up with Teresa, his girlfriend and former student. Looking to create a binding codependency that will prevent them from ever breaking up, they tell each other their darkest, most compromising secrets. They break up a few days later anyway, and Pietro moves on with his life. He gets married and starts a family and publishes a book on the brokenness of the Italian education system that makes him a minor celebrity in intellectual and activist circles. He goes on speaking tours in support of his book and becomes close with a publicist and is on the verge of starting an affair with her when Teresa shows up to an event and picks up on their chemistry. She threatens to tell his secret if he goes through with the affair. For the rest of his life, Pietro is a haunted man, constantly wondering if and when Teresa will share his secret with the world.

I liked a lot of the things that Trust did. I liked the way Starnone managed to undermine Pietro, his narrator and protagonist, in a way that felt natural and seamless, both through Teresa’s presence in the story and certain plot beats in the latter half. In the final pages, the perspective shifts and his daughter, a successful journalist, as she is petitioning the government to award a lifetime achievement to her father. The shift felt jarring but necessary, and I appreciate how it was able to clue the reader into Pietro’s fate while leaving him in the dark, de-centering him from the story.

Trust made for an interesting double feature with The Days of Abandonment. Not only are both Italian novels about marriage and infidelity and gender roles, but some have proposed that Starnone is either the real writer behind the Ferrante pseudonym or the husband of the real Ferrante, the translator and writer, Anita Raja. I find speculating on this a bit distasteful and pointless, but still, it’s hard not to let your head go there when you are reading these books back to back. For what it’s worth, I don’t think he is Ferrante, but I’m not willing or capable of backing this opinion up with anything more than vibes.